Conspiracies Review

Summary

Rating:

Overall:Interesting blend of detective and sci-fi genres, full-range 3D movement, and fairly good music -- but with obscure puzzles and object-hunting, 2D graphics in some 3D environments, mediocre FMV quality, and a not-so-original storyline

In Nick Delios: Conspiracies (commonly called just
Conspiracies), Greek developer Anima Ppd/Interactive is
bringing us another bleak view of the near future. The year is 2063,
and the Earth is predictably all messed up, what with crime,
overpopulation, unemployment, ravaged environment ... you know, the
works. Technically, Earth is united as a series of city-states under
one Higher Federal Government (HFG), but big corporations and
organized crime are powers unto themselves. Furthermore, the HFG wants
Earth to join a confederation of civilized planets called the Regional
Galaxy Alliance (RGA), but many powerful people, who believe the RGA
is dangerously pacifistic and open to attack from more aggressive
alien races, are working to sabotage the proposed alliance.

One man soon to be thoroughly entangled in this mess is Nick Delios, a
former top student at the University of Thessaloniki who specialized
in medical software. His life was going great until Dimitris Argiriou,
the head of his scientific team, stole Nick's best work and claimed it
was his own. When Nick protested, Argiriou threw Nick off the team and
sabotaged his upcoming marriage to Argiriou's sister. Nick gave up his
academic career and got heavily into drinking and gambling. To help
pay off his debts, he started taking work as a private detective
specializing in cases of industrial espionage.

The game's story opens with Nick losing big at the dice table in a
fancy casino and getting thrown out. Then who should come along with a
job offer but Dimitris Argiriou, the man responsible for Nick's
despondency. Argiriou uses the fact that Nick's broke and can't pay
off his many debts to coerce him into agreeing to help find an
important person who's difficult to locate. Nick has no choice but to
agree, and wakes up the next morning in his apartment with a vicious
hangover.

There are a few multiple-choice dialogue options during the opening
video sequence, but the game really begins the next morning at Nick's
place. I was absolutely delighted to discover that not only are
the game's environments 3D, but you can move around in them with
complete freedom of movement. You can move forward, backward, strafe
side-to-side, use mouselook ... it's great! This is incredibly rare in
pure adventure games, and I've been wanting to see it in more games
for years. The movement keys are the arrow keys and not the usual
W-A-S-D set, and you can't reconfigure the keyboard. You also can't
jump or crouch or fly (though you can swim and run), but it's still a
real thrill despite those little details.

As for gameplay, a large majority of it consists of object hunting and
using. The designers take full advantage of the 3D environments and
all of the corresponding object-hiding possibilities. You'll find some
items inside others, some under furniture, some up high on a hidden
ledge, etc. Furthermore, the cursor doesn't indicate in any way when
it's over a takeable or otherwise interactive item. Besides that, many
of the game's puzzles made little or no logical sense to me even after
I'd solved them, which I accomplished only by repeated application of
one of the "Golden Rule of Adventure Games" -- when stuck, try using
every inventory item with every other item in your inventory and in
the environment. Then again, I'm not much of a detective, so that may
have been the problem. Even so, there weren't any puzzles that I
thought were totally random or stupid -- just really hard to reason
out. There were also a couple of minor, but still irritating, timed sequences near the end. Due to these problems, I'd rate this game as being fairly difficult for
everyone except perhaps dedicated detective adventure veterans.

The game doesn't take great pains to kill you at every turn or trick
you into using an item too early and then getting stuck much later
on. However, it is possible to get killed or to just plain lose due to
saying the wrong thing to someone important or not doing something
just right, and there are often very few clues as to what you did
wrong and how to fix it. The message "GAME OVER, YOU LOSE!!!" that
appears in big letters after every demise isn't very helpful, which is
another reason to classify this as a difficult game.

Conspiracies also struck me as being fairly linear, even though
many minor puzzles (most of which have to do with getting an object
you'll need later) can be solved sooner than they have to be. I know
the game is touted as being non-linear, but the fact that you can
travel to some places before you need to and can pick up most items
before you have to use them doesn't make the game non-linear in my
opinion. Not when you can't solve major plot-related puzzles in
several different orders, anyway.

Despite the galactic scope hinted at in the game's backstory, very
little in the way of aliens and other worlds is seen anywhere in the
game. Most of it is much more mundane and down-to-Earth. For example,
the first major puzzle you have to solve is how to make coffee. You do
eventually get to visit a space station, and there is a time travel
sequence where you go back to the year 2019 in order to find the
"difficult to locate" guy that Argiriou needs. Also, the conspiracy
you have to crack involves actual aliens, but you don't ever get to
meet them or even see what they look like. The overall plot, though
not totally predictable and dull, is fairly unoriginal and contains
numerous cliches -- some from the detective fiction genre, and some
from science fiction (interesting blend, though). I don't want to give
too much away here, but I will say that the game ends with several
unresolved issues, thereby promising a sequel.

The graphics in the game are really quite good, though many of the FMV
cut scenes look rather rough and grainy around the edges of actors
(due to blue screen compositing, or some such), and some of the items
in the 3D environments are actually flat 2D graphics. I thought it was
hilarious the first time I went to a place with an unmoving cardboard
cutout of a woman standing behind a bar. When you click on people to
talk to them, you get a nice FMV sequence, but not when you're
wandering around in 3D mode. As for the acting quality, I would rate
it as only passable, and I'm very undemanding on that point. Most of
them act like they're just casually reading their lines off a cue
card, having never seen them before or rehearsed them at all. Also,
for English-speaking players, the words don't match the actors' mouth
movements due to the fact that they did the filming in Greece and were
speaking Greek. Oh, well. Despite that, I still say FMV sequences are
one of the most entertaining ways to fill in story details and keep
the plot moving.

I was happy to discover that there are very few technical difficulties
with the game (at least if you have the optimum gaming rig to play it
on), none of which were show-stoppers or even close. There are a
couple of places where I was mysteriously teleported to the other end
of the region when I was running round in a certain spot, sometimes I
got several conversation topic responses in a row when I was talking
to someone, I once got stuck in one place so that I couldn't move and
had to restore a game, and there are some minor graphics problems when
rotating some inventory items. I'm happy to say that's the worst of
it, and those things only happen rarely. The Anima Ppd/Interactive
people put together a very robust game.

All in all, I'd say that Conspiracies is well worth the $29.99 list
price for anyone who's heavily into adventure games, especially big
FMV adventure fans, detective adventure fans, and those who can't
resist the rare adventure game that has actual full-range motion in 3D
environments instead of the usual Myst-like "point-to-point"
travel. Other players could still find a worthwhile gaming experience,
but may want to wait for a price drop.